I decided to build a robot and his name is Deckard. He’s mostly made of Lego with a Raspberry Pi for a brain. He’s going to be learning lots of skills and he’ll be quite social as he tweets about all his actions as well. He’ll understand spoken commands, he’ll be able to explore, function as an embarrassing alarm clock (he can take photos and has access to Twitter), reward work with biscuits, act as a security camera, tweet genomes, and be driven remotely from anywhere in the world. But it’s baby steps for now. He’s still a mess, very bulky and covered in cables. At the moment I’m making sure that he’ll be able to avoid obstacles when exploring. Here’s a little video of him in action:

The next step is perfecting the voice recognition. You might have spotted a button on his left side near the back. When that button is pressed, he listens for 3 seconds for a command. I’ll upload a video of the voice commands when I’m happy with it. Once he’s a bit more complete you’ll find him tweeting at @DeckardRobot.